A few months ago, my wife's father and his girlfriend told us they wanted to get us a big leather chair for Christmas. We didn't really want a leather chair, nor did we have anywhere to put it, so we told them "We really appreciate the offer, but don't really have room for that right now. If you wanted to get us a piece of furniture, one thing we actually do need is a coffee table."
And we sent them a few pictures of some basic white Ikea coffee tables, and we went a few months without hearing anything on that front. Fast forward to last weekend, they came to visit, as they do 3-4 times a year, and they told us they had brought our coffee table. The first thing we noticed while unloading it was that it looked nothing like what we wanted. (completely covered in mirrored glass if you're curious)
At the time, we didn't know what to say, so we just said "thanks" and left it at that, but it looks terrible in our house and we don't see any way that we'd be able to keep it. We want to get rid of it, preferably selling it and using the money to buy the coffee table we wanted, but we don't want to hurt any feelings in the process.
In researching what it would take to sell it, we found out that the table likely cost at least $350, which is 2-3 times what the tables we were looking at cost and is also likely a significant amount of money for my father-in-law (this is by far the largest gift we've ever gotten from him). He and his girlfriend are both fairly agreeable people, but they kept telling us how proud they were of the table that they had picked out and how much they thought we were going to like it.
How can we get rid of the coffee table and explain our choice while keeping hurt feelings to a minimum?